Fourier and the “greenhouse effect”1

Abstract

Despite what is often claimed, the French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was not the first to compare the Earth's atmosphere with a greenhouse or hothouse. That comparison was made more than a century earlier by Edme Mariotte in 1681. Neither did Fourier provide a correct analytical description of the heat balance of the Earth surface and its atmosphere. It appears that the first scientist to do so was the French physicist Claude Pouillet in 1838.

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